"And did she say, 'Yes, but the veil can be raised?'"
"She did, mon pauvre ami," said the poet.
"And did you raise it?"
"I did," said the poet.
"And so did I," I answered. And as I spoke, there was a crash of whitemarble in my soul, and lo! Love had fallen from his pedestal and beenbroken into a thousand pieces,--a heavy, dead thing he lay upon thethreshold of my heart.
We had appointed a secret meeting in the salon of the pension thatafternoon. I was not there! (Nor, as I afterwards learnt, wasSemiramis.) When we did meet, I was brutally cold. I evaded all hermoves; but when at last I decided to give her a hearing, I confess itneeded all my cynicism to resist her air of innocence, of patheticdevotion.
If I couldn't love her, she said, might she go on loving me? Might shewrite to me sometimes? She would be content if now and again I wouldsend her a little word. Perhaps in time I would grow to believe in herlove, etc.
The heart-broken abandonment with which she said this was a sore trialto me; but though love may be deceived, vanity is ever vigilant, andvanity saved me. Yet I left her with an aching sense of having been abrute, and on the morning of my departure from Paris, as I saidgood-bye to William and Dora, I spoke somewhat seriously of Semiramis.Dora, Dora-like, had believed in her all along,--not having enjoyedWilliam's opportunities of studying her,--and she reproached me withbeing rather hard-hearted.
"Nonsense," said William, "if she really cared, wouldn't she have beenup to bid you good-bye?"
The words were hardly gone from his lips when there came a little knockat the door. It was Semiramis; she had come to say good-bye. Was it innature not to be touched? "Good-bye," she said, as we stood a momentalone in the hall. "I shall always think of you; you shall not be tome as a ship that has passed in the night, though to me you havebehaved very like an iceberg."
We parted in tears and kisses, and I lived for some weeks with thatsense of having been a Nero, till two months after I received a muchglazed and silvered card to the usual effect.
And so I ceased to repine for the wound I had made in the heart ofSemiramis Wilcox.
Of another whom I met and loved in that brief month in Paris, I cherishtenderer memories. Prim little Pauline Deschapelles! How clearly I canstill see the respectable brass plate on the door of your littleflat--"Mademoiselle Deschapelles--Modes et Robes;" and indeed the"modes et robes" were true enough. For you were in truth a veryhard-working little dressmaker, and I well remember how impressed I wasto sit beside you, as you plied your needle on some gown that must befinished by the evening, and meditate on the quaint contrast betweenyour almost Puritanic industry and your innocent love of pleasure. Idon't think I ever met a more conscientious little woman than littlePauline Deschapelles.
There was but one drawback to our intercourse. She didn't know a wordof English, and I couldn't speak a word of French. So we had to makeshift to love without either language. But sometimes Pauline wouldthrow down her stitching in amused impatience, and, going to her daintysecretaire, write me a little message in the simplest babyFrench--which I would answer in French which would knit her brows for amoment or two, and then send her off in peals of laughter.
It WAS French! I know. Among the bric-a-brac of my heart I stillcherish some of those little slips of paper with which we madeinternational love--question and answer.
"Vous allez m'oublier, et ne plus penser a moi--ni me voir. Leshommes--egoistes--menteurs, pas dire la verite..." so ran thequestions, considerably devoid of auxiliary verbs and such details ofconstruction.
"Je serais jamais t'oublier," ran the frightful answers!
Dear Pauline! Shall I ever see her again? She was but twenty-six.She may still live.
CHAPTER XIV
END OF BOOK THREE
So ended my pilgrimage. I had wandered far, had loved many, but I cameback to London without the Golden Girl. I had begun my pilgrimage witha vision, and it was with a vision that I ended it. From all my goingsto and fro upon the earth, I had brought back only the image of awoman's face,--the face of that strange woman of the moorland, stillhaunting my dreams of the night and the day.
It was autumn in my old garden, damp and forsaken, and themulberry-tree was hung with little yellow shields. My books lookedweary of awaiting me, and they and the whole lonely house begged me totake them where sometimes they might be handled by human fingers,mellowed by lamplight, cheered by friendly laughter.
The very chairs begged mutely to be sat upon, the chill white beds tobe slept in. Yes, the very furniture seemed even lonelier than myself.
So I took heed of their dumb appeal.
"I know," I answered them tenderly,--"I too, with you, have looked onbetter days, I too have been where bells have knoll'd to church, I toohave sat at many a good man's feast,--yes! I miss human society, evenas you, my books, my bedsteads, and my side-boards,--so let it be. Itis plain our little Margaret is not coming back, our little Margaret,dear haunted rooms, will never come back; no longer shall her littlesilken figure flit up and down your quiet staircases, her hands filledwith flowers, and her heart humming with little songs. Yes, let us go,it is very lonely; we shall die if we stay here all so lonely together;it is time, let us go."
So thereon I wrote to a furniture-remover, and went out to walk roundthe mossy old garden for the last time, and say good-bye to the greatmulberry, under whose Dodonaesque shade we had sat half frightened onstarry nights, to the apple-trees whose blossom had seemed likefairy-land to Margaret and me, town-bred folk, to the apricots and thepeaches and the nectarines that it had seemed almost wicked to own,--asthough we had gone abroad in silk and velvet,--to the little grassyorchard, and to the little green corner of it, where Margaret hadfallen asleep that summer afternoon, in the great wicker-chair, and Ihad brought a dear friend on tiptoe to gaze on her asleep, with herolive cheeks delicately flushed, her great eyelids closed like thecheeks of roses, and her gold hair tumbled about her neck...
Well, well, good-bye,--tears are foolish things. They will not bringMargaret back. Good-bye, old garden, good-bye, I shall never see youagain,--good-bye.
BOOK IV
THE POSTSCRIPT TO A PILGRIMAGE
CHAPTER I
SIX YEARS AFTER
This book is like a woman's letter. The most important part of it isthe postscript.
Six years lie between the end of the last chapter and the beginning ofthis. Meanwhile, I had moved to sociable chambers within sound of thecity clocks, and had lived the life of a lonely man about town, sinkingmore and more into the comfortable sloth of bachelorhood. I had longcome to look back upon my pilgrimage as a sort of Indian-summer youth,being, as the reader can reckon for himself, just on thirty-seven. Asone will, with one's most serious experiences, hastening to laugh lestone should weep, as the old philosopher said, I had made some fun outof my quest, in the form of a paper for a bookish society to which Ibelonged, on "Woman as a Learned Pursuit." It is printed among thetransactions of the society, and is accessible to the curious only byloan from the members, and I regret that I am unable to print anyextracts here. Perhaps when I am dead the society will see thecriminal selfishness of reserving for itself what was meant for mankind.
Meanwhile, however, it is fast locked and buried deep in the archivesof the club. I have two marriages to record in the interval: one thatof a young lady whom I must still think of as 'Nicolete' to SirMarmaduke Pettigrew, Bart., of Dultowers Hall, and the other thewell-known marriage of Sylvia Joy...
Sylvia Joy married after all her fine protestations! Yes! but I'm sureyou will forgive her, for she was married to a lord. When one is twentyand romantic one would scorn a woman who would jilt us for wealth andposition; at thirty, one would scorn any woman who didn't. Ah me! howone changes! No one, I can honestly say, was happier over these twoweddings than I, and I sent Sylvia her petticoat as a wedding present.
But it was to tell of other matters that I reopen this book and oncemore take up my pen--matt
ers so near to my heart that I shrink fromwriting of them, and am half afraid that the attempt may prove too hardfor me after all, and my book end on a broken cry of pain. Yet, at thesame time, I want to write of them, for they are beautiful and solemn,and good food for the heart.
Besides, though my pilgrimage had been ended so long, they are really apart, yea, the part for which, though I knew it not, all the rest hasbeen written--for they tell how I came to find by accident her whom solong I had sought of design.
How shall I tell of Thee who, first and last of all women, gave andawoke in me that love which is the golden key of the world, the mysticrevelation of the holy meaning of life, love that alone may passthrough the awful gates of the stars, and gaze unafraid into the blueabysses beyond?
Ah! Love, it seemed far away indeed from the stars, the place where wemet, and only by the light of love's eyes might we have found eachother--as only by the light of love's eyes... But enough, my Heart,the world waits to hear our story,--the world once so unloving to you,the world with a heart so hard and anon so soft for love. When thestory is ended, my love, when the story is ended--
CHAPTER II
GRACE O' GOD
It was a hard winter's night four years ago, lovely and merciless; andtowards midnight I walked home from a theatre to my rooms in St.James's Street. The Venusberg of Piccadilly looked white as a nun withsnow and moonlight, but the melancholy music of pleasure, and the saddaughters of joy, seemed not to heed the cold. For another hour deathand pleasure would dance there beneath the electric lights.
Through the strange women clustering at the corners I took myway,--women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, andHittites,--and I thought, as I looked into their poor paintedfaces,--faces but half human, vampirish faces, faces already waxen withthe look of the grave,--I thought, as I often did, of the poor littlegirl whom De Quincey loved, the good-hearted little 'peripatetic' as hecalled her, who had succoured him during those nights, when, as a youngman, he wandered homeless about these very streets,--that good, kindlittle Ann whom De Quincey had loved, then so strangely lost, and forwhose face he looked into women's faces as long as he lived. Oftenhave I stood at the corner of Titchfield Street, and thought how DeQuincey had stood there night after night waiting for her to come, butall in vain, and how from the abyss of oblivion into which some cruelchance had swept her, not one cry from her ever reached him again.
I thought, too, as I often did, what if the face I seek should be hereamong these poor outcasts,--golden face hidden behind a mask of shame,true heart still beating true even amidst this infernal world!
Thus musing, I had walked my way out of the throng, and only a figurehere and there in the shadows of doorways waited and waited in the cold.
It was something about one of these waiting figures,--some movement,some chance posture,--that presently surprised my attention andawakened a sudden sense of half recognition. She stood well in theshadow, seeming rather to shrink from than to court attention. As Iwalked close by her and looked keenly into her face, she cast down hereyes and half turned away. Surely, I had seen that tall, noble figuresomewhere before, that haughty head; and then with the apparition athought struck me--but, no! it couldn't be she! not HERE!
"It is," said my soul, as I turned and walked past her again; "youmissed her once, are you going to miss her again?"
"It is," said my eyes, as they swept her for the third time; "but shehad glorious chestnut hair, and the hair of this woman is--gilded."
"It is she," said my heart; "thank God, it is she!"
So it was that I went up to that tall, shy figure.
"It must be very cold here," I said; "will you not join me in somesupper?"
She assented, and we sought one of the many radiating centres offestivity in the neighbourhood. She was very tired and cold,--so tiredshe seemed hardly to have the spirit to eat, and evidently the cold hadtaken tight clutch of her lungs, for she had a cough that went to myheart to hear, and her face was ghastly pale. When I had persuaded herto drink a little wine, she grew more animated and spots of suspiciouscolour came into her cheeks. So far she had seemed all but obliviousof my presence, but now she gave me a sweet smile of gratitude, one ofthose irradiating transfiguring smiles that change the whole face, andbelong to few faces, the heavenly smile of a pure soul.
Yes, it was she! The woman who sat in front of me was the woman whom Ihad met so strangely that day on that solitary moorland, and whom inprophecy still more strange my soul had declared to be, "now and forever and before all worlds the woman God had created for me, and thatunless I could be hers and she mine, there could be no home, no peace,for either of us so long as we lived--" and now so strangely met again.
Yes, it was she!
For the moment my mind had room for no other thought. I cared not toconjecture by what devious ways God had brought her to my side. Icared not what mire her feet had trodden. She had carried her facepure as a lily through all the foul and sooty air. There was a pureheart in her voice. Sin is of the soul, and this soul had not sinned!Let him that is without sin amongst you cast the first stone.
"Why did you dye that wonderful chestnut hair?" I asked herpresently--and was sorry next minute for the pain that shot across herface, but I just wanted to hint at what I designed not to reveal fullytill later on, and thus to hint too that it was not as one of thenumber of her defilers that I had sought her.
"Why," she said, "how do you know the colour of my hair? We have nevermet before."
"Yes, we have," I said, "and that was why I spoke to you to-night.I'll tell you where it was another time."
But after all I could not desist from telling her that night, for, asafterwards at her lodging we sat over the fire, talking as if we hadknown each other all our lives, there seemed no reason for an arbitrarydelay.
I described to her the solitary moorland road, and the grey-gownedwoman's figure in front of me, and the gig coming along to meet her,and the salutation of the two girls, and I told her all one look of herface had meant for me, and how I had wildly sought her in vain, andfrom that day to this had held her image in my heart.
And as I told her, she sobbed with her head against my knees and hergreat hair filling my lap with gold. In broken words she drew for methe other side of the picture of that long-past summer day.
Yes, the girl in the gig was her sister, and they were the onlydaughters of a farmer who had been rich once, but had come to ruin bydrink and misfortune. They had been brought up from girls by an oldgrandmother, with whom the sister was living at the time of my seeingthem. Yes, Tom was her husband. He was a doctor in the neighbourhoodwhen he married her, and a man, I surmised, of some parts and promise,but, moving to town, he had fallen into loose ways, taken to drinkingand gambling, and had finally deserted her for another woman--at thevery moment when their first child was born. The child died "ThankGod!" she added with sudden vehemence, and "I--well, you will wonderhow I came to this, I wonder myself--it has all happened but six monthsago, and yet I seem to have forgotten--only the broken-hearted and thehungry would understand, if I could remember--and yet it was not life,certainly not life I wanted--and yet I couldn't die--"
The more I came to know Elizabeth and realise the rare delicacy of hernature, the simplicity of her mind, and the purity of her soul, theless was I able to comprehend the psychology of that false step whichher great misery had forced her to take. For hers was not a sensual,pleasure-loving nature. In fact, there was a certain curiousPuritanism about her, a Puritanism which found a startlinglyincongruous and almost laughable expression in the Scripture almanacwhich hung on the wall at the end of her bed, and the Bible, and two orthree Sunday-school stories which, with a copy of "Jane Eyre," were theonly books that lay upon the circular mahogany table.
Once I ventured gently to chaff her about this religiosity of hers.
"But surely you believe in God, dear," she had answered, "you're not anatheist!"
I think an atheist, with all her expe
rience of human monsters, was forher the depth of human depravity.
"No, dear," I had answered; "if you can believe in God, surely I can!"
I repeat that this gap in Elizabeth's psychology puzzled me, and itpuzzles me still, but it puzzled me only as the method of working outsome problem which after all had "come out right" might puzzle one. Itwas only the process that was obscure. The result was gold, whateverthe dark process might be. Was it simply that Elizabeth was one ofthat rare few who can touch pitch and not be defiled?--or was it, Ihave sometimes wondered, an unconscious and after all a sound casuistrythat had saved Elizabeth's soul, an instinctive philosophy that taughther, so to say, to lay a Sigurd's sword between her soul and body, andto argue that nothing can defile the body without the consent of thesoul.
In deep natures there is always what one might call a lover's leap tobe taken by those that would love them--something one cannot understandto be taken on trust, something even that one fears to be gladlyadventured ... all this, and more, I knew that I could safely venturefor Elizabeth's sake, ere I kissed her white brow and stole away in theearly hours of that winter's morning.
As I did so I had taken one of the sumptuous strands of her hair intomy hand and kissed it too.
"Promise me to let this come back to its own beautiful colour," I hadsaid, as I nodded to a little phial labelled "Peroxide of Hydrogen" onher mantelshelf.
"Would you like to?" she had said.
"Yes, do it for me."
One day some months after I cut from her dear head one long thick lock,one half of which was gold and the other half chestnut. I take it outand look at it as I write, and, as when I first cut it, it seems stilla symbol of Elizabeth's life, the sun and the shadow, only that thegold was the shadow, and the chestnut was the sun.
The Quest of the Golden Girl: A Romance Page 15